"everything That Rises Must Converge" - Flannery O'connor - 1961
Introduction
Flannery O'Connor's short story "Everything that Rises Must Converge" was originally published in 1961 in New World Writing. By the time of its publication, O'Connor was already an acclaimed Southern writer known for fiction that often employed violence and the grotesque to convey a message. The violent episodes in her fiction provide opportunities for characters to receive spiritual redemption, though they do not always obtain it. As a practicing Catholic, O'Connor believed it was necessary to use violence and depravity in her stories in order to, as Patricia S. Yaeger notes in the "Flannery O'Connor" entry in Modern American Women Writers, "make modern perversions visible to a nonreligious audience accustomed to seeing perversions as 'natural.'"
O'Connor has become synonymous with the literary use of the grotesque. A grotesque is a character or situation whose features and attributes have been heightened or distorted, as in a caricature drawing. Grotesques allow O'Connor's readers to encounter extreme situations with heightened consequences so that they might discover a new perspective. Though O'Connor hated to be labeled merely as a Catholic writer—she believed her themes and subject matter to go beyond religion—she readily acknowledged her faith's influence on her writing.
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